The advance of the economy and the civilization has brought in a series of diseases, for example, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, hepatitis, hyperlipidemias, diabetes, cardiology, renal failure, gout, and apoplexy. To realize the symptoms of such diseases personally, the Point-of-Care (POCT) products have been paid close attention for a long time. With the POCT products, people can check the physical condition at anytime, anyplace. To fit in with the market requests, such self-testing products tend to be fast, cheap, and small, without requiring further help about the operation.
There are still many disadvantages for the conventional electrochemical analysis systems. One disadvantage is that the general electrochemical analysis systems provide one-to-one analyses only. For example, the blood sugar analysis test strip used with the blood sugar analysis apparatus cannot be applied to analyze other biochemical substance, for example, cholesterol. Therefore, it is not practical using such analysis systems to analyze multiple biochemical substances at the same time. To overcome the above problem, some systems will integrate apparatuses for multiple biochemical substances into the same unit. However, users still have to manually switch to a proper analysis mode corresponding to the desired biochemical substance. This may be regarded as an extra operation burden.
The other disadvantage is that a whole blood sample can be, for example, used for analyzing certain biochemical substances, for example, cholesterol. This can be referred to systems mentioned in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,120,420, 5,762,770, and Taiwan Patent No. 124332. The blood cells in the whole blood sample will obviously interfere with the cholesterol electrochemical reaction. Therefore, before analyzing those biochemical substances in the conventional systems, the whole blood sample has to be processed in advance. To overcome the above problems, some inventions try to integrate a pre-treatment device to exclude the blood cells from a whole blood sample. These inventions are referred to in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,033,866 and 6,436,255. However, such systems are not practical because of the complicated operation and the necessary amount of blood. Besides the blood cells, the whole blood sample contains other components, for example, uric acid, vitamin C, or acetaminophen. These components will also impact the electrochemical analysis results for certain biochemical substances.
Accordingly, it is advantageous to have a novel electrochemical quantitative analysis system to overcome the limitations of the conventional technology.